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Glenn Close as “Ma Bumblefuck” in Ron Howard‘s Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix, Oscar season). Apparently a supporting role. Her character is actually called “Mamaw”…accent on the second syllable, rhymes with Macaw. Check out the wardrobe and grooming! An oversized pink KMart T-shirt, spotted baby blue slacks, gray and white brillo-pad hair.

Close almost won the Oscar for The Wife in early ’19, and then The Favourite‘s Olivia Colman snatched it away. Close has to win this time…she has to.

J.D. Vance’s 2016 novel, a portrait of how things got worse and worse for white downmarket Americans over the last 30 or 40 years, was adapted into a multi-generation narrative by Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water).

Vance’s book is more of a personal recollection than a narrative.

“An extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strength”, said one reviewer. “A harrowing portrait of much that has gone wrong in America over the past two generations,” said another. HE plug, sight unseen: “A stirring tribute to the yokels who put Donald Trump into the White House and in so doing nearly destroyed the country…thanks!”

Costarring Amy Adams as Bev Vance and Freida Pinto as Usha Vance…can we just stop right there? Has anyone who’s visited a bumblefuck town or region (Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas, Mississippi) ever noticed native women who look as pretty as Adams and Pinto? Drop-dead beatiful is not exactly an everyday feature of Bumblefuck culture…be honest. Beautiful eyes or wonderfully symmetrical facial features don’t come with the territory.

Costarring Gabriel Basso as J.D. Vance, Haley Bennett as Lindsaym, and Bo Hopkins as “Papaw.”

Glenn Close during filming of Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy.

Michael Winner‘s Scorpio (’73) is a midrange, mostly unexceptional spy thriller about CIA management trying to assassinate an apparent double agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster) who, they believe, has probably been sharing information with the Russians. The would-be assassin is Jean Laurier aka “Scorpio” (Alain Delon), a Cross protege from way back.

Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor was a much better film of this sort (i.e., amoral CIA higher-ups scheming to murder one of their own), but at least Scorpio came early in this cynical cycle. Shot in the early summer of ’72, just before the Watergate break-in. Released on 4.19.73, just as the Watergate coverup was beginning to unravel.

And yet Scorpio, for all its underwhelming aspects, has a great payback scene in which Lancaster and a couple of wily freelancers manage to quietly plug the hardnosed CIA chief (John Colicos) who’s been out to eliminate Lancaster and whose CIA henchmen have murdered Lancaster’s wife.

I like this scene so much that I’ve watched Scorpio a couple of times over the last couple of decades, despite my less-than-enthusiastic view of it. I’m even considering buying the Twilight Time Bluray, mainly because it’s ten bills with shipping. I don’t know if this is a category or not, but what other films (if any) are people soft on because one and only one scene works especially well?

Scorpio boasts a couple of scenes between Lancaster and Paul Scofield, as a kind of Russian counterpart, that aren’t too bad. It also has an amusing bit in which Lancaster slips past U.S. customs by disguising himself as a bearded African-American minister.

Post-release Lancaster said Scorpio was “nothing incisive, just a lot of action” and was “one of those things you do as part of your living, but you try to avoid doing them as much as you can.”

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The Aero was totally packed for Saturday night’s (2.22) screening of Elem Kimov‘s Come and See. A strange, surreal, odd-behavior film during the first half, and a devastating antiwar horror film during the last 50 to 60 minutes. Brutal, savage, compassionate art — a landmark effort.

Commendable 4K restoration, 1.37:1, excellent sound — couldn’t have looked better.

L.A. Times critic Justin Chang was there; ditto Peter Rainer and Paul Merryman, producer of Rod Lurie‘s The Outpost, which will soon debut at South by Southwest. I discussed it earlier today with Lurie briefly. I also kicked it around with my son Dylan, who’s watched it two or three times.

Lurie: “The last time I met Roger Ebert he asked me to recommend a film that I’d assumed he’d never seen. I gave him Come and See. A few weeks later he wrote about it in his Great Films series. That ending shot of the lead protagonist, Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko), shooting the framed Hitler photo is what I think inspired that shot of the killing of Hitler in Inglourious Basterds.”

Lurie believes that Come and See “is maybe the best war film I’ve ever seen, certainly once the invasion of Belarus begins.”

Born in October of ’69 and somewhere around nine or ten years old (older?) during filming, Kravchenko is now 50. I’m not exactly certain when principal photography started and ended, but I think it began sometime in ’77.

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“I’m really worried about our ability to defeat Donald Trump if [Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg] are our final two choices. If we have to choose between somebody who wants to burn things down in a way that I think a lot of American just don’t identify with, and somebody else who thinks he can just buy this with a personal fortune of a billionaire…I don’t think either of those choices is going to make it possible for us to bring American together and defeat this President.

“That’s why I’m offering a different approach. I think most of us agree that we can do a lot better than the President we have now, and that we have to change things in this country before it’s too late.”

HE to Pete: It breaks my heart to admit this, but it’s already too late. We’re all locked into a kind of electoral penitentiary right now, and our jailers, I regret to say, are purist progressives, Millennials, Bernie Bros and to a large extent African American voters (particularly the older homophobes). We’re basically fucked because of these guys, and partly because fellows like Kid Notorious think moderate progressives like yourself are the problem and not Bernie. It’s pretty close to a hopeless situation.

Donald Trump and Vladmir Putin couldn’t be more delighted. Stick a fork in me.

Team Trump is naturally delighted and relieved that Bernie Sanders will be the nominee. As recently reported by intelligence sources Putin, who wants the gullible, useful-idiot Trump to have another term, is happy about this also. Down-ballot Republicans are also reportedly elated about Bernie.

God help us but it’s all falling into place for the right. Trump is naturally biding his time and keeping silent about Bernie’s ascendancy. But when he gives the order after Democratic voters have locked Bernie in solid, it’ll be a massacre..

Nate Silver has reminded that Sanders has never been “punched” by the rightwing fear and hate machine. Just wait.

I can’t believe this is happening. Well, I can but this feeling of gathering horror and the numbing of the community spirit is horrible. We’re still in February and we’re already fucked. The Bataan death march begins today in Nevada.

I meant to tweet “dooming us all to 2nd Trump term.”

How progressive. https://t.co/jmoALtx6Ra

— Kim Masters (@kimmasters) February 22, 2020

The only thing that didn’t quite work about John Krasinki‘s A Quiet Place (’18) is that I could never detect a social metaphor. The horror, it seemed, was totally situational in a random-ass way. Don’t make a sound or the big brown alien monsters will rush in and murder you whambam. Okay, fine, but what’s the real-life echo?

Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby‘s The Thing was about early ’50s paranoia over invaders from the sky, be they Russians or flying saucers. Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers was about submitting to the blandness of the Eisenhower years…the mid ’50s conformity of the suburbs. George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead was about a sick society grappling with evil histories and buried behaviors — dead bodies walking the earth in order to wreak vengeance. Rosemary’s Baby was…I’m not sure but it had something to do with that 4.8.66 Time magazine cover that asked “Is God Dead?” Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook was some kind of metaphor about car crashes and dead husbands and the terror of facing parenthood alone.

But what was A Quiet Place about?

It hit me a couple of days ago. All you have to do is change “don’t make a sound” to “don’t make the wrong sound” or more precisely “don’t say the wrong thing.” Then it all fits. The big brown monsters are fanatical wokesters who rush in like the wind and destroy your life and livelihood if you mutter the wrong phrase or use incorrect terminology or happen to like Real Time with Bill Maher or late-period Woody Allen films or if you posted the wrong thing in 2009, etc.

Now it makes sense! Now I get what Krasinki was on about, and what A Quiet Place Part II probably has in mind. I’m perfectly serious.

There are ten upcoming 2020 releases that smell like possible Best Picture material. To me anyway. David Fincher‘s Mank, Aaron Sorkin‘s Trial of the Chicago 7, Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel, Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, Joel Coen‘s Macbeth, Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Leos Carax’s Annette, Paul Greengrass’s News of the World and Terrence Malick‘s The Last Planet. (10)

I know that Carax’s film…actually I know nothing except it’s a musical and Carax is crazy in a good way. I’m sensing that post-Parasite things suddenly feel a lot less constrained as far as Best Picture criteria are concerned. I know that Malick doesn’t do Oscar-aspiring films, but Planet is some kind of Jesus of Nazareth saga. (Almost certainly not geared for the Mel Gibson crowd.) I have a 12-year-old draft of Sorkin’s film — just received it today. I’ve read Mank, but I’d also love to read Blonde, Stillwater and News of the World.

Ana de Armas in Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde.

The somewhat-less-likelies include Chris Nolan‘s Tenet, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks, Denis Villenueve’s Dune, Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods, Edgar Wright’s Last Night In Soho, Steven Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, Adrian Lyne’s Deep Water and Liesl Tommy‘s Respect. (11)

Not to mention Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. (4)

That’s 25 head-turners for starters. What am I missing, cream of the crop-wise?

Earlier this month I repeated a matter of common industry knowledge about Ben Affleck and Gavin O’Connor‘s The Way Back (Warner Bros., 3.6). Affleck has been famously struggling with alcohol issues for years, and so (in the realm of the film) is “Jack Cunningham”, a former basketball star who bends the elbow. The film is therefore self-portraiture to some extent.

Today a N.Y. Times profile of Affleck, written by Brooks Barnes, acknowledges the obvious and offers Affleck a forum by which to admit his past sins and express regrets.

The photos reveal that Affleck is no longer the “fat bearded boozer” he plays in O’Connor’s film. He’s sober (for now), shaven and relatively slender. Then again, as Barnes’ piece reports, Affleck has had three stints in rehab (in ’01, ’17 and ’18) and then he relapsed last fall.

Affleck admission #1: “I drank relatively normally for a long time. What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.

Affleck admission #2: “It’s not particularly healthy for me to obsess over the failures — the relapses — and beat myself up. I have certainly made mistakes. I have certainly done things that I regret. But you’ve got to pick yourself up, learn from it, learn some more, try to move forward.”

Affleck admission #3: “People with compulsive behavior, and I am one, have this kind of basic discomfort all the time…[they’re] trying to make yourself feel better with eating or drinking or sex or gambling or shopping or whatever. But that ends up making your life worse. Then you do more of it to make that discomfort go away. Then the real pain starts. It becomes a vicious cycle you can’t break. That’s at least what happened to me.”

Affleck admission #4: “Relapse is embarrassing, obviously. I wish it didn’t happen. I really wish it wasn’t on the internet for my kids to see. Jen and I did our best to address it and be honest.”

The Way Back opens two and a half weeks hence, but nobody I know has seen it.

Note: If I’m not mistaken the N.Y. Times used to capitalize the “i” in internet – no longer.

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Posted on 12.18.07: “Throwing a bag of Mexican takeout food at a cab is not what anyone would call a mature or attractive thing to do, but that’s what I did last night after a Boston Checker almost hit me as I was crossing Commonwealth Avenue in slushy snow. I have to be honest and say it felt right for about three or four seconds. Then I felt like an idiot.

I turned to my left and saw a pair of killer headlights half-screeching and half-skidding towards me. Instead of leaping out of the way I went into a dead-freeze, deer-in-the-headlights mode. The cab stopped — no exaggeration — with less than six inches to spare.

Anyone who’s ever escaped getting hit like this knows that the usual reaction is rage. I think I said something really cool and clever like “what the fuck are you doing, asshole?” Their cab driver screamed something back in the same vein. That tore it — he almost kills me and then he yells at me? That’s when I threw the Mexican takeout, which hit the passenger-door window.

The cabbie, double-riled by the bean dip and guacamole splattered over the rear door and window, hit the brakes and jumped out, and I went into mock Sideways mode (Thomas Haden Church swinging the club on the golf course) and howled like an animal. The driver jumped back in and drove off. End of dignified altercation.

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I doubt I’ll be seeing Ricky Tollman‘s Run This Town (Oscilloscope, 3.6). Mainly because of Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen, The Politician), who has one of those faces you can’t help but fantasize about punching or at least slapping. In this trailer Platt seems to radiate a certain dim-witted, candy-assed uncertainty and open-mouthed ambivalence, and hanging with him for 99 minutes would almost certainly be too much to bear. I hate this guy.

Pic follows Platt’s Bram Shriver, a Toronto reporter whose professional prospects are enhanced when he’s fed a cellphone video of then-Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (Damien Lewis in a fat suit) smoking crack. You’ll notice that the trailer never gives you a good look at Lewis’s obese mayor. To go by Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest review (4.16.19), there’s a reason for that.

Posted on 4.16.19: “It doesn’t help at all that Mayor Ford — who looms large, literally and physically, despite his status as a supporting character — is played by a heavily latexed Damian Lewis in a less-than-convincing fat suit. Lewis so closely resembles Mike Myers’ Fat Bastard character in the Austin Powers franchise that it’s practically impossible to fully appreciate his spot-on portrayal of a man with an unstable id checked only sporadically by an image-conscious superego (Donald Trump, anyone?).”

Has a fat suit ever worked in a dramatic film? Yes — John Lithgow‘s Roger Ailes in Bombshell. Other instances?

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Now that Criterion has established itself as an outfit that likes to add teal tints to highly regarded classics (Teorema, Midnight Cowboy, Bull Durham, Sisters), I’m naturally dreading what might happen with their forthcoming Great Escape Bluray, which will street on 5.12.

Make no mistake — with four teal-tinted disasters to their credit, a Criterion Bluray of a late 20th Century color film is now something to be feared.

To go by DVD Beaver captures that I’ve posted three or four times, what they’ve done with the above four titles is nothing short of vandalism. I’m especially concerned with DVD Beaver‘s Gary W. Tooze having complained seven years ago that MGM’s 2013 Great Escape Bluray was “a little heavy on the teal.”

Even if Criterion doesn’t screw the colors up, their 4K remastering almost certainly won’t deliver a “bump” to John Sturges’ 1963 war classic. I’ve seen this film ten or twelve times, most recently a restored projected version at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival, and it just doesn’t look all that extra–level. It never did and it never will. Daniel Fapp‘s 35mm cinematography is perfectly fine but except for two or three sequences that were either shot in fog or tinted misty-gray, there’s nothing about his widescreen visuals that really stand out.

I don’t know why Criterion is even releasing a 4K digital restoration, but God forbid they”ll make it look worse than even before.

“Underwhelming Great Escape“, posted on 4.27.13: “I caught yesterday afternoon’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening of The Great Escape, and I’m sorry to say that it was a pleasant but no-great-shakes experience.

“John Sturges‘ classic World War II action drama has been remastered for a forthcoming Bluray (due May 7th) and I was assuming that the DCP version would make this 1963 film look and sound a little spiffier and brassier and more eye-filling than it did the last time I saw it in a theatre, which was sometime in the ’80s.

“Especially, you know, if the DCP guys scanned the original negative and were given the funding from MGM Home Video to do an extra nice job.

“I’m kidding, of course. MGM Home Video is renowned as a bargain-basement outfit. They don’t want to spend a dime more than they have to. If MGM Home Video ran an airline you wouldn’t want to fly with them, trust me. The result is that they probably scanned an inter-positive rather than the original Great Escape negative with an order to do the best job they could within a tight budget. I don’t know any budgetary facts but what I saw on the big Chinese screen looked like a handsomely-shot film that had been mastered by the Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company.

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For as long as I can remember the pitchforkers have come out of the woodwork almost every time Roman Polanski is mentioned in any context. They certainly jumped in yesterday when I posted about the Cesar Academy having announced its intention to resign following the 45th Cesar Award telecast on 2.28, “partly for the crime of handing out 12 Cesar nominations to Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy, and partly for insufficient nursing of political ties with feminist or #MeToo-supporting filmmakers.”

The piece was titled “French #MeToo-ers Boot Cesar Academy,” but before you could turn around the discussion had devolved into a condemnation thread about Polanski’s predatory behavior with under-age girls in the ’70s and ’80s, which allegedly included rape and assault. Rape is obviously a vicious crime, but because I tried to mitigate the vitriol by referring to European cultural imprints about ages of consent between 14 and 16, I was called a “piece of shit”; another Polanski qualifier was called a “loathsome fuckstick.” As if we were somehow attempting to excuse the odious scenario of a 42 year-old man having it off with a 13 year-old girl.

This morning I noted that “Americans have always plugged their ears over the European age-of-consent norms but cultural imprints matter, and the vast majority of European countries set their ages of consent between, believe it or not, ages 14 to 16, which strikes me personally as way too young. I’ve always thought 18 was a decent benchmark.

“13-14 is definitely, emphatically too young. Ditto 15. When you hit 16 you’ve stepped into American cultural imprint territory because of Ringo Starr’s ‘you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine’ and Randy Newman‘s ‘half pound of cocaine and a 16 year-old girl in a long black limousine on a hot September night.’ But 16 is too young, I feel, and so is 17. 18 seems right. We all know about teen hormones and that nobody’s going to stop basic impulses, but women under the age of 18 are arguably lacking in judgment. They should be entitled to all-hands-off status if they want that, and the law should enforce this.

“And in terms of older guys having it off with younger women, they should steer clear of anyone under 20. Once women hit 20, or the average age of a junior in college, they’re on their own.”

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